peripheries

Ads for Aids

June 22nd, 2008 | by User Image

Roger |

Following up on the difficulty to produce efficient and appropriate advertising material promoting safe sex in the mainstream media, here are two ads based on the same imagery. On the left, a Stanfield’s ad for a line of underwear, on the right a Terence Higgins Trust ongoing prevention campaign aiming at rising awareness of STIs.

What is interesting would be to know which audience each poster is aiming at and which audience is really responding. Trendy fashion designers like Calvin Klein and D&G have always played with homoeroticism, and despite the rise (and rapid fall) of the metrosexual man, it is probably women who are mostly in charge when it comes to buy men’s underwear.

Now it seems that ads drawing on eroticism are acceptable as long as an invisible line is not crossed. This was the case with these two ads. On the left D&G decided to pull out the ad after several complaints. On the right, France’s Advertising Standards Authority asked for this prevention poster designed by Nan Goldin for the National Institute for Prevention and Health Education to be pulled out arguing the image is too explicit.

Though the D&G advert does not really depart from previous campaigns, it is arguably difficult not to agree that there is an unsettling element in the way the woman is depicted. “Is the image glorifying gang rape or tapping into a sexual fantasy?” asked Susanna Schrobsdorff in Newsweek, a question that does not frankly come to mind when looking at the French campaign poster. It is rather difficult to find out what is too explicit.

Now, what if the woman had been on top? What if the couple had been a straight couple?